Thanks!
I had a very long lunch today with a good friend of mine who has been involved in R/C cars and racing since almost the very beginning of the hobby. He had a suggestion to solve all the "issues" here.
His advice is to create a general set of rules for 1/8 GT racing, leaving out any of the limitations. Any chassis, any engine, any number of ports (which I was told nobody checks anyway), any price, and so on. Those rules would be just like the "open" class for the other R/C classes. This should be very easy to do.
Then, any clubs, groups, tracks, whatever, can create their own "special" class to be used at their races. This is where you could apply motor price limits, or anything else.
If the people putting on the current "World Championship" events want to use their set of rules for those races, they go ahead and do so.
If the people here trying to form a group to set up their own set of rules for a "series", to be held at different tracks, ditto.
It's like when Serpent created the "Serpent Impact Series" many years ago, where all cars had to be Serpent Impact cars. It worked out fine.
If you guys want an "open" class and a "spec" class, you just create and publish the rules.
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Problem solved - no more infighting, no more "control" issues, and so on.
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After reading Grenade10's thoughts up above, I'll just separate the "basic" rules from those that add limits. It's easy to do. When it's finished, all the 1/8 GT classes would be using the same "basic" rules, but groups could select whichever "limits" they desire to make it into a "spec" class.
One disadvantage of this is that different groups will be using slightly different rules, but that's pretty much the case anyway. There are club rules. There are ROAR rules. There are IFMAR rules. They're never identical. ......and if ROAR adopts a set of these, the ROAR rules will then exist. If the class grows in popularity, IFMAR will refine those rules and post their own. A quick comparison of the ROAR rulebook with the IFMAR rules will show the same "basic" rules, but with a lot of additional rules added on by IFMAR.